Outlook Search Folder to track *email ZEB*

As anyone who reads Microsoft blogs knows, we get a lot of email, *a lot*. We’re also on email *all* the time. I’ve had way to many conversations at midnight or 6am on anything. It consumes you 🙂 To manage it all, I took a “Managing Action Using Outlook” course circa 2001 which was great. While I’m more of a pragmatist then devout follower, it’s a must have for anyone overwhelmed by email. In the beginning of the class, they asked person to “confess” how much unread email they had in their inbox. I had ~250 unread emails and I thought I was bad. One of the managers in the room had 4,000 unread emails. And I thought I was bad!

Back to the point of this blog post – I’ll use the term my manager’s manager, John Montgomery has coined, ZEB – Zero Email Bounce for an Outlook search folder I made to track whether you’re caught up on email. ZEB is derived from ZBB or Zero Bug Bounce which describes when development has caught up to test and cleared the bug backlog. The ZEB Search folder let’s you track if you have any red or yellow flags that haven’t been responded to in two days, but you can change this as you see fit 🙂

Steps to create your Email ZEB Search Folder

From Outlook 2003, Click File New…Search Folder…

In the New Search Folder Dialog Box scroll down to the bottom and select “Create a Custom Search Folder”

Yes but even in the "powerful" Office Outlook 2003 I still cannot achieve some simple things that would have made my life much easier. Perhaps, from your experience managing so much mail at Microsoft, you may be able to suggest some alternatives / solutions.

Example1:

In my calender folders I want to apply a view which will:Show all appointments arranged by Start date.Show all future (active) appointments. But:Do not show any future (active) appointment which is:1. A holiday, 2. A birthday or 3. An Aniversary. ie. has one of these three categories.I hope that these desires of mine are not considered by Microsoft as too extreme. After all, it is quite natural to want to see only your future appointments except if they concern birthdays or holidays. Why shouldI be force to view eg. holidays as well?The issue is that this desire of mine cannot be realised. I tried the following SQL statement in the Filter dialogbox of a new view I created:("urn:schemas:calendar:dtstart" >= ‘today’ AND "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office#Keywords" <> ‘Aniversaries’ AND "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office#Keywords" <> ‘Holidays’ AND "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office#Keywords" <> ‘Birthdays’)The AND between the Categories does not work! Why? Only the OR operator works which is stupid since if you say not Birthdays or not Aniversaries etc, everything will be included. Whilst you should be able to say not Birthdays AND not Aniversaries, etc to get the desired results.

Example2:

In the Inbox I want to create a view showing all the e-mail which is up to one week old and also all e-mails that have not been read. How can I do that?The Filter dialogbox does not allow you to say:1. show e-mail that has been Read and which is in the last week,and also,2. show e-mail that is Unread regardless of date.Even Outlook Express could do that. Why not Office Outlook with its rich viewing options?Thanks.